My least favorite part of online editorial in the 2000s was the way the business side dictated basic design and site operations.

I mean, of course it did, and it always has: When I worked for a small town newspaper, the layout days went in this order: The ad team took the space they needed, then the galleys came to editorial to fit the news into what was left.

In my ideal world, I guess newspapers would have been magical objects that let you fit everything of note editorial was able to produce that week, and I remember arriving to web publishing and thinking they were, now.

The web publisher I worked for took it in a different direction:

We got a mandate to keep articles to around 400 words or less because “the sidebar ad placements usually end around 300 words, so what’s the point of more words?”

The design team there was running a factory, constantly acquiring blogs and independent websites, redesigning them to shift from display ads to lead generation, and moving on to the next. So they weren’t in a mood to listen.

I wrote a pointed email to the outgoing editor of The Oregonian a few years ago talking about the ways oregonlive — the Oregonian’s site — is user hostile and unhelpful: Heds and deks that don’t inform, pages and pages of “business news” rewritten from Wendy’s press releases, a stunning amount of gambling news, and of course the ad networks. It’s truly a bad and discrediting website that is the way it is because Google disciplined web publishers into prioritizing churn over quality.

The editor was polite but utterly dismissive, reminding me that the editorial side of the house has almost nothing to say about a lot of the design decisions. In The Oregonian’s website, you can see that the business side has decided its work is finished, and editorial is its willing accomplice. It’s junk. As someone who lived through the utter destruction of online editorial at the hands of content farms 15 or 20 years ago, I am less freaked out about “AI slop” than many because to my mind we crossed a boundary years and years ago. The rest is just the business side perfecting the model.